Past improvements Progress in environmental monitoring and numerical weather and climate prediction has been intimately connected with the progress in supercomputing. Over the last few decades, advances in computing power...

“What are you actually doing?” That is not a question that a management group likes to hear. But it is the question that the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) Director General Marianne Thyrring and Deputy Director General Anne Højer Simonsen have faced with from their stakeholders on several occasions. Besides the daily weather forecasts, most people simply do not know what DMI does. One of the things DMI does is store data that extends far beyond the five-day forecasts and gale warnings. “And these data are worth gold,” says Ms Thyrring.

As atmospheric CO 2 continues to increase, more and more CO 2 enters the ocean, which reduces pH (pH is a measure of acidity, the lower the pH, the more acidic the liquid) in a process referred to as ocean acidification. Declines in surface ocean pH due to ocean acidification are already detectable and accelerating.

The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, signed in 1987, has been successful in that the amount of chlorofluorocarbons is now slowly diminishing. A common misunderstanding, however, is the belief that the ozone problem has been solved and the ozone layer is back to its original state.

How severely will climate change affect different regions the United States? It depends on climate policy, says new research by the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. The US National Climate Assessment, released this spring by the White House, describes a troubling array of climate woes, from intense droughts and heat waves to more extreme precipitation and floods, all caused by climate change.